Friday, February 13, 2015

Visualizing Sound Waves



In the music video "CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music," Nigel Stanford and his band perform a song on drums and keyboards. The sound waves of the instruments are visualized through a series of analog physics experiments. Although the effects look digital, they're not. Everything is captured in camera.

The experiments include a Chladni PlateSpeaker Dish, a Hose PipeFerro Fluid, a Ruben's Tube. In the climactic shot, a stunt double dons a heavy Faraday suit next to a Tesla Coil. He safely attracts a high voltage arc, and jumps to make the arc skip to the ground. Those foregoing links take you to a series of behind-the-scenes videos that show how it's done, or you can read about it here.

Stanford says the video was inspired by the idea of synesthesia. "This got me thinking that it would be cool to make a music video where every time a sound plays, you see a corresponding visual element, " he says. "Many years later, I saw some videos about Cymatics - the science of visualizing audio frequencies, and the idea for the video was born."

Director Shahir Daud and cinematographer Timur Civan restrict the video to a limited palette of grays, and they alternate real time with slow motion.
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Link to the video on Vimeo and YouTube
Cymatics on Wikipedia
Nigel Stanford's new album: Solar Echoes

4 comments:

S. Stipick said...

As humans and artists we strive to capture the brilliantly beautiful moments that life has to offer and those wildly imaginative moments that we wish life could offer and thusly express them as we perceive them or wish others could share with us.. It is ever so humbling to be reminded that the universe has provided and surrounded us with infinite amounts of invisible beauty. Whether it is a rainbow waiting to be unlocked through refraction, the imperceptible radios waves of a signing star, or the visual information concealed in a sound wave.

The video was beautiful and wildly imaginative.Thanks you for sharing this.

S.S.

S. Stipick said...

and just when I thought I managed to get this one right. Two periods in one sentence and a s on the end of thanks. Ugh!

Unknown said...

That was one of the more intriguing expositions I've seen in a long time. The instruments were all unfamiliar to me and the effects were wonderfully weird.

krystal said...

Badarse! Love it!